Crypto dollars have never been more valuable.
Alongside Bitcoin hitting new highs, stablecoins across all issuers are now worth a record $190 billion, according to DefiLlama.
Tether makes up more than 70% of the market, but top stablecoin products from Circle and Ethena have all grown by more than 10% over the last month.
“We’ve seen a massive increase in stablecoin transactions on our platform,” Varun Paul, market infrastructure and senior director of CBDCs at Fireblocks, told DL News.
“It accounts for more than half of what we see in volume across the platform.”
Here’s what’s driving growth.
What’s driving stablecoins?
Instead of transferring money from a bank to an exchange and trading more volatile cryptocurrencies, traders can quickly swap in and out of cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar to speculate.
After Bitcoin, stablecoins are one of the crypto industry’s most compelling contributions to mainstream financial infrastructure.
“Digital gold still is the main use case of crypto,” Luca Prosperi, CEO of stablecoin firm M^0, told DL News. “Stablecoins are the most immediate Trojan horse as an entry product into crypto rails.”
Fintech giants PayPal, Robinhood, and Stripe have all entered the stablecoin market in some form.
PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD is now the eighth-largest after it launched in August 2023. Trading app Robinhood is also launching its stablecoin with various crypto firms like Galaxy Digital and Kraken.
Stripe’s acquisition of a stablecoin bridge project for $1.1 billion is perhaps the strongest indicator of where financial infrastructure firms are looking next.
Soaring prices are a huge boon to stablecoin growth, too. That’s because they are the most popular trading pairs on major exchanges.
And when prices soar, so does trading activity.
Since Donald Trump won the US elections on a platform promising deregulation and various crypto-friendly appointees, Bitcoin has rallied more than 42%. The entire crypto market has grown by $1.1 trillion over that same period, according to CoinGecko.
Stablecoins rose nearly 10% since November 6.
Stablecoins in 2025
Experts are now looking to key stablecoin legislation in the United States.
“Defining who can issue stabecoins, how they work, what’s allowed and what’s not allowed still hasn’t occurred,” Robert Leshner, CEO of tokenisation firm Superstate and founder of Compound Finance, told DL News.
“It’s extremely likely in 2025 we’ll see stablecoin legislation, which creates clear expectations for stablecoin issuers, which will lead to potentially a lot more participants coming into the market.”
Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi Correspondent. Got a tip? Email at liam@dlnews.com.
